Daily Archives: September 30, 2016

I’m a writer. And so, of course, I’m on Twitter. Somedays it feels like 90% of Twitter’s users are writers, and that I suspect is a big part of Twitter’s problem at this time. Problems which have lead in turn to the possibility of its sale to Google, or Salesforce, or Disney, or please dear god no News Corp.

There is clearly a lot of value in Twitter. If you’re the place where Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump go to exchange bitchy sub-tweets, you must be doing something right. But nobody seems to know how to unlock that value as cash, least of all its current owners and management, who sometimes seem to be the people who understand the platform least in all the world. Twitter Moments? Please.

Twitter is, I think, the most misunderstood thing to come out of the last decade or more of social networking. Because twitter isn’t a social network. Sure, it networks people in a social way, but we can all see it’s not going to grow up to be Facebook. Twitter has grown up, it is what it is. And what it is, is deeply misunderstood.

Twitter is also not a media platform. Yes, I can put a video on Twitter. But is it convenient for anybody to watch that video on Twitter? Absolutely not. The animated GIF is great on Twitter. Because it’s succinct. It fits into the un-official, ever evolving grammar that is the answer to the question, “what is a tweet?” Because a tweet isn’t a status update. Neither is it a micro-blog. A tweet is a tweet, and what a tweet is, is something specific and very important to this age of digital communication.

Let’s consider this issue from the opposite direction. Imagine I waved a wand and made every human on the planet psychically connected to every other human. You don’t have to imagine that hard, we’re pretty close to that reality when we stare into our little black rectangles of glass and steel. And all our VR headsets and whatever follows them are taking us even closer. But take it the few extra steps to full on psychic communication, mind-to-mind, you think it I hear it kind of thing.

How in the hell would that work? Seriously, if the state of the internet is any indication, I don’t want to have the sordid contents of human kind’s collective consciousness squirted into my headspace. I don’t even want to be exposed to most of what people I LIKE think about, let alone the ugly thought processes of #gamergate or the #altright. To work, psychic communication, like all forms of communication, from smoke signals to the telephone, requires a protocol. And that protocol would have to look almost exactly like Twitter.

I don’t want to “hear” everybody’s thoughts so I choose people I’m interested in to follow. I only want to share specific thoughts of my own, so I package them in, oh, something like a tweet. Those tweets have to be succinct – 140 characters, an image, a micro-video perhaps, so they can go into a stream of all the people I follow, that I look at as and when I want to. And so on. The way Twitter works is much the way a future race of highly evolved psychic humans would communicate. Which I guess tells you something about how bitchy, petty, sordid and occasionally enlightening the future of human communication is likely to be.

Why not Facebook? Why not Snapchat? Why not some other social network? Facebook is, by design, a platform for limited social networks. Friends, family, work colleagues, etc. Snapchat is for the stuff you want to do on a social network that you want to DISAPPEAR FOREVER after it’s shared with a specific group. Both super important in their own ways. But twitter is the collective consciousness of all humanity. That’s why it’s where elections happen. That’s why it’s where the news discussion happens, and why every news reporter in the world is basically just a twitter scavenger at this point. And what Twitter has that makes it the platform of choice for the collective consciousness of our species, and those who want to communicate to it, is the best protocol to regulate that communication.

What Twitter does not seem to have is the first clue that it’s sitting on the protocol for human psychic communication. And, consequentially, Twitter has very little inkling of what Twitter actually is. Hence the long series of blunders and years of stymied growth that make a sale of Twitter likely. Will the new owners have any clue what Twitter is? Unlikely. Can Twitter be saved? It doesn’t really matter. The protocol that makes Twitter interesting, and the collective consciousness currently being regulated by it, will simply evolve around another platform if Twitter dies. But that would be a shame. I for one hope Twitter figures out what it has on its hands, and sees the quite obvious way ahead once that realization is made.